Last week during the first episode of Inside Xbox for 2019, it was announced that existing owners of Sea of Thieves or anyone who has downloaded it via Xbox Game Pass would be given three game codes to give to friends to try the game for free for a week with their Friends Play Free program. I bought the game at release and played a couple of times but couldn’t get into it. The game has received multiple content updates since then including ‘Cursed Thieves’, ‘Forsaken Shores’ and ‘Shrouded Spoils’ plus more, all for free. I thought it’d be a great time to try out the game, and what better way to do so than with mates.
I sent off codes to Garbz, Juzza and Frequency, and man was it worth getting into! I haven’t laughed that much in a game in a long time, it was hilarious. We were complete noobs at first not knowing what to do, how to start voyages or how to find the relevant islands hinted in the voyage clues to search for treasure. Here’s a video of our first play session. It’s lengthy at 1.5 hours and moderate language warning here, but throughout you’ll see some of the funny things we got up to, including getting blown up by skeletons, bitten in the face while carrying a snake (who stores a snake in a whicker basket with holes, honestly!?) and sinking our first ship, oops!
All laughs aside, I was super impressed with how much fun we had and the detail of the ocean. I don’t think there’s a game that has done the open ocean better than Sea of Thieves. There’s a great example of this at the 1:02 mark in the video. I had to go off to feed my daughter Charlotte so i left the capable Captain Garbz in control of the ship. What does he do? Run it aground of course! Then he patches it up while sailing into the waves which look incredible. If you’re prone to motion sickness, be careful watching this as it’s pretty rocky rolly!
Later that night we teamed up with Juzza for a couple of hours and I couldn’t stop laughing, we had so much fun! We’re still a little bit disappointed that there aren’t more RPG elements in the game such as stats for weapons/clothing. Everything is cosmetic only and makes no difference to how hard to you hit monsters or dig treasure faster etc. On one hand this means everyone is equal out there and so good players know how to play the game really well, but for me I would really like to see some visual increases in strength of my items and my character which then opens up harder content for us to challenge. Still, the game is not even 12 months old yet so there’s plenty of life left in it!
There’s still 1 more day left of the Friends Play Free trial, so if you have a chance to play I highly recommend giving it a go. Plus, anyone who redeems a Friends Play Free code will receive a 35% discount when they buy the game digitally on Xbox One or Windows 10 PC between February 6-27.
Sea of Thieves hits their 1-year anniversary on March 20 this year and the Rare Ltd developers have teased some big announcements when they hit this milestone. I’m looking forward to playing some more!
#gameonAUS
